Tips for Developing a Custom Executive Education Program
The School recently designed a custom executive education program for Covidien, a leading supplier of health care products. Mario Muñoz, Covidien’s manager for integrated marketing, Latin America spearheaded the program, which he developed with School of Business professors and the School’s executive education director. Muñoz offers these tips for firms interested in setting up a custom program of their own:
- Ask business unit directors and other higher-level management about their needs.
- Do a gap analysis, looking at where the company is, where it wants to go and what it’s missing to get there.
- Design a skeleton for the program to fill the gap.
- Make the business case to top executives using the gap analysis, and offer the skeleton program as the solution. Muñoz told the president of his division that “we can’t take the employees all out and put them through an MBA program, but we can immerse them into a three- or four-day intense learning environment … and it will open up a door into breaking a paradigm.”
- Once you have approval, go back to the first set of directors and managers and show them that it can address their needs and incorporates many of their ideas.
- Design a set of capstone projects: deliverables that each team from the program will work on after the program ends.
- Give participants opportunities to apply concepts from the executive education to company projects. “The people that came [to the UM School of Business] began to teach others,” Muñoz says.
